The Bourgeois Public Discusses Art III: Transnational Media, Mediators and Art Practices in Central Europe.

This workshop seeks to explore the intricate relationship between the bourgeois public and literature and the arts, with a focus on the transnational role of the media, mediators and art practices in Central Europe from the late 18th century until the end of the 19th century: Although many of the media were associated with one particular art form and language, they can also be seen as more complex actors in the contemporary negotiation of identities or their intermedial and intercultural transfer.

The workshop The Bourgeois Public Discusses Art III: Transnational Media, Mediators and Art Practices in Central Europe, will take place on 6-7 November 2025 at the Institute of Czech Literature of the CAS (Na Florenci 3, Prague 1).

Program

6 November 2025

9.00 Dalibor Dobiáš / Pavla Machalíková
(Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
Opening

9.15 Meike Wagner (Ludwig Maximilian
University, Munich)
Modelling the Bourgeois Theatre as a Public Institution. August Wilhelm Iffland as a Public Persona, Mediator and Performative Agent around 1800

9.45 Aleksandra Wojda (Université de Lorraine,
Nancy)
Song Editions and Music Periodicals as Transnational Media of Constructing Patterns of a Polish-Language National Identity in the Long 19th Century

10.15 Taťána Petrasová (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Bürger, Mitbürger and Weltbürger: How Central-European Media Shaped a Bourgois Audience after the Napoleonic Wars

10.30 Demian Berger (University of Zurich)
Polemics and Autonomy of Art in the Pre-March Period

10.45 Coffee break

11.00 Dalibor Dobiáš (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Viennese Magazines of the Early 19th Century Between the Literatures of the Monarchy/National Literatures

12.00 Marina Protrka Štimec (University of Zagreb)
Explaining Poetry in Romanticism. Stanko Vraz’s Epitextual Dictionary

12.30 Lunch break

14.00 Krisztina Lájosi Moore (University of Amsterdam)
The Transnational Constructions of National Arts: The case of Liszt’s Chopin

14.30 Karel Šima (Charles University, Prague)
Celebrating the Art Transnationally? Centenaries of Schiller, Shakespeare and Michelangelo in Prague

15.00 Pavla Machalíková (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Education and Popular Leisure in Exhibiting

7 November 2025

9.15 Margaret Samu (The New School, New York)
Art or Spectacle? Painting and Urban Entertainment in the 1870s and 1880s

9.45 Karol Jóźwiak (University of Wrocław)
The Body as Medium in Jewish-Polish Visual Culture

10.15 Coffee break

10.30 Miha Valant (University of Ljubljana)
The Forgotten Curtain: Adolf Liebscher’s Painted Theater Curtain and Czech-Slovene Artistic Connections in the 19th Century

11.00 Lucie Česká (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences) – Ondřej Kubáček
Private Collections on Public Display: The Practice of Art Loans and Bourgeois Reception

Organized by the Institute of Art History and the Institute for Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences